The oven of deception

From all appearances, I have a very nice oven, more pristine and functional-looking than my oven in Melbourne, in fact. When I first tried to bake muffins in it, though, I had a very TIK moment. The first thing I heard from my oven was a loud crack, followed by several smaller ones. Internal explosions kept happening in my oven and I ended up with some shards of ceramic in my not-exactly-successful muffins.

Why? Because the top heating element of the oven touches the oven ceiling and, as you can see from the second picture, this was causing the ceramic to explode off. My landlady is coming to look at the oven later today (though I don't dare to hope that she'll actually fix it) but in the meantime, I discovered last night that I am quite able to roast pumpkin in it using only the bottom element. There were no ceramic splinters in my pumpkin, though it was sweeter than the pumpkin varieties we get in Australia (that is not the oven's fault).

So many of us...

Today was a grocery purchasing day and I was blown away by these mushrooms. They remind me of Sylvia Plath's poem about mushrooms taking over the world - they just look so fecund: very 'so many of us'!

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

Sylvia Plath ("Mushrooms")

The Stranger at my Door

So, on my first day in my new apartment (Wed), I was putting clothes in wardrobes in the evening when someone knocked on my door (my doorbell doesn't work - TIK. I could ask my landlady to fix it but it doesn't seem worth the trouble of getting someone who speaks Russian to ring her just about a doorbell when people can and do just knock.)

Having looked out my peephole to see an unknown man, I decided to ignore the knock. I mean, what if he had dishonourable intentions? Besides, even if he was a friendly neighbour making a call, I wouldn't have been able to communicate with him anyway. He didn't go away, though - instead, he knocked again, I ignored him again, and then the power in my apartment went out. Cottoning on that whoever this man was, he had control over my electricity supply, I raced to get my key so I could open my door. In case he was secretly a rogue who'd managed somehow to cut off my power supply just to make me open the door so he could perform some dastardly deed, I also picked up my sturdy tablespoon (15som at Osh Bazaar) which was lying on top of my washing machine (the closest weapon that was pick-up-able and yet not menacing enough to provoke aggression should the man be indeed an official figure).

Thence ensued a fairly amusing, rather desperate attempt on both our parts to communicate what had happened. He kept making cutting gestures with his fingers to indicate that he had cut off my electricity supply (I had figured that, so this didn't get us very far) - while incongruously asking me "Japan? Korea?", to which I replied "I'm Chinese" when I realised that he was asking about my ethnicity. (People here in Kyrgyzstan seem very concerned about this - he is probably the sixth or seventh random person (including bazaar stallholders) who has expended great communicational energy trying to ascertain this.)

Anyway, I rang Sher so that she could communicate more effectively with him about matters of greater import (in that context) than my ethnic background. It turns out that he thought the last tenant hadn't paid the electricity bill. In a country with a power crisis, this results in pretty immediate and drastic action. In fact, my landlady had been very emphatic (in Russian, translated for me by my local helper who assisted me when I made the rental agreement) about the need to pay the electricity bill on time. What saved me or at least my power supply was the electricity bill with an attached payment receipt that she'd left me along with the microwave she brought on Tues night. I showed this to the electricity man, who examined it, turned my power supply back on, apologised to me (in English) and left. TIK.

TIK bedsheet

People here have an expression, "TIK", which I've already heard a number of times, though I've only been here for a week. It means 'This is Kyrgyzstan' and is used whenever something turns out to not work or not work quite the way a Westerner would have anticipated or desired. It is usually said in an amused tone. Well, I had a TIK moment when I attempted to put my newly purchased and washed bedsheet on my bed. You might be able to see in the first picture the orange strip on the top of my bed. This is my mattress. Yup, the bedsheet is not large enough to be tucked in either length-wise or breadth-wise, which makes it impossible to make a hospital corners bed. This gives me an excuse for sloppy bed making, but I would probably rather have a bed sheet I can tuck in so it stays on my bed. The bedsheet also has an obvious seam running along it - obviously where two sheets of fabric were sewn together. It would never be sold in, say, Target, but TIK - and I'll get used to it!

Incidentally, while shopping for household necessities, I discovered some difference of aesthetic taste between Kyrgyz and me. The design you witness was the one O1 liked - there weren't many options so I thought I might as well pick a design which Kyrgyz visitors will derive aesthetic pleasure from. The blanket which you witness in the second shot is incredibly soft and actually (unintentionally) matches my pink curtains quite well.

The perils of shopping for water

There are a few schools of thought among foreigners in Bishkek about the drinkability of tapwater here. Some have a water filter and boil their water, some just boil the water, some buy bottled water and drink this exclusively (though they will drink chai when eating out or at friends' places), and some happily drink tapwater (this appears to be the smallest group and usually those who have been here for a long time).

My current practice is to boil tapwater, though a friend informed me last night that this does not address the main problem, which is heavy metals in the water. Anyway, yesterday I ventured out to Nerodni, which is a kind of departmental store across the road from where I live. I figured that in stores of this sort, the price of everything is written down and then your items are scanned and the amount you have to pay appears on the cash register, so that the whole shopping experience can proceed perfectly smoothly with or without command of the Russian language.

Well. I was wrong. One of the things I wanted was two water bottles which I could use to store boiled water. Confronted by a shelf full of different varities of bottled water, ranging in price from 16som to 25som (about 70c to A$1) and all labelled and described in Russian, I picked two mid-range bottles. I returned home to open the innocuous bottle pictured - and water fizzed out all over my kitchen floor! Turns out Europeans or something love carbonated water and most of those bottles were probably carbonated. I am informed that a way to tell carbonated from non-carbonated water is by squeezing the bottles - carbonated water bottles will be harder and firmer than non-carbonated water bottles. (This, incidentally, was probably ironically one reason why I picked those particular bottles - in my ignorance, they felt solid and thus re-usable.)

The Ultimate Mattress

You can't see it, but this "exclusive lovely" matress is apparently anti-mosquito, anti-stress, anti-bacterial and created using the technology of relaxtic and smellwell.

Pringles, watch out - you've got competition!